Free Steam MMO Crosswind promises PvP pirate ship battles and open-world exploration

Crosswind is a newly announced free-to-play pirate MMO coming to Steam. Hoping to avoid the mediocre reception of Skull and Bones, Crosswind is taking a somewhat different approach to the piracy gameplay. Crosswind Crew, the developer behind Crosswind, seems to be taking a rather ambitious approach to gameplay mechanics. 

Instead of focussing on swashbuckling, seafaring adventures, like Sea of Thieves and Skull and Bones, Crosswind is apparently encouraging players to go on land-based and seafaring adventures. According to the game's Steam Store page and the various teasers posted to the Crosswind subreddit, switching from sea-based to land-based gameplay will be seamless, and players will be able to upgrade their ships and build and maintain on-land bases. 

While it's still early days, the current version of Crosswind features a 30–40 hour story, three playable ships and one merchant ship class, ground and naval combat, three unique biomes with their own enemies, bosses, and resources, as well as land-based crafting and survival gameplay with an early version of the legendary Tortuga island, which will serve as a social hub. The development team is currently working on adding more features, like the promised ship customisation, improved character customisation, more weapons, three new playable ships, two additional biomes, a ship's crew, ship interiors for boarding encounters, and a new merchant ship for plundering. 

Like a typical survival game, a large part of the challenge is meant to come from collecting and managing resources, and players can engage in both PvP and PvE gameplay. Part of Crosswind Crew's ambitious goals for the game include an overarching plot that involves mysterious supernatural beings, so it might get a little weird in future game updates. The various bosses strewn across the different open-world biomes already have their own dark supernatural powers to spice up boss battles. 

Crosswind hasn't got an official release date just yet, but the second alpha playtest is currently live on Steam. The game's minimum requirements are a little steep, with an AMD RX 6800 or Nvidia GeForce RTX 1080 Ti counted as the bare minimum, so keeping an eye on those Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 deals on Amazon might not be a bad idea.